SEO for Ecommerce Websites: Why Does it Matter?
What is SEO for Ecommerce Websites?
Ecommerce SEO is when you make your online store visible in the search engine results pages, or better known as SERPs. When people look and search for products that are for sale, you want to rank as high as possible to get more organic traffic for your store. Organic traffic is when visitors land on your website from unpaid search results. Ecommerce SEO usually involves adjusting headlines, product descriptions, internal link structure, and navigational structure for a smooth search and user experience.
Why Does SEO Matter for Ecommerce?
It is highly likely that people will be using search engines to find a product or service that they may need. They want to look for options, tips, comparisons, and any other information to help them decide on their purchase. If your website is nowhere to be found in the SERPs, you lose access to qualified and interested ecommerce customers, which are both huge factors of your website being found. Ecommerce SEO provides you a way to reach your target audience without having to pay for ads. By the time you get people to your website, you can inform them about your high-quality products and have calls to action that will convince them about your products.
Benefits of Ecommerce SEO
- Lead generation: when your website is ranked higher in search results, it is wide open for potential buyers to look at products similar to what you offer. They are more likely to become customers because they have already expressed interest in your industry.
- Brand awareness: high search engine result ranking helps your brand become more discoverable to a broader audience. Websites listed on the first page of Google are more reputable and credible since they are the first thing that users see when searching for something.
- Higher click through rate (CTR): people are more likely to click on the top search results. With ecommerce SEO used effectively, your website is very likely to appear among the top results, increasing the chances of searchers visiting your online store.
- Improved user experience: optimizing website structure, navigation, website speed, page load times, and a mobile-view option are all key factors of a good user experience. Those good experiences result in high customer satisfaction and increased chances of customers willing to do business with you again.
Different Strategies for Ecommerce Websites
Ecommerce SEO might sound tedious to do, even if you already have a booming website with various products on display. Patience is a virtue, but following certain strategies can help to speed things up:
- Use the right keywords: keywords still matter in ecommerce SEO. You don’t want to overload your product titles and descriptions with keywords you chose, but they still need to be visible. Amazon is a gold mine of keywords since people search on Amazon with some intent of buying something. It will generate autofill suggestions as keyword ideas you might consider using.
- Do some competitor research: your competitors are one of your sources for looking up their strategy of on-site optimization. Larger competitors already have done the work in optimizing their websites and learning many of their secrets on their websites themselves can be a good starting point on deciding where to begin. Keywords are something you should focus on since you’ll want to take a look at the keywords on their homepages as well to see how they use them. SEMRush and are handy tools worth using to see what keywords your competitors are ranking.
- Simplify your homepage: this plays an important role in search optimization. You want your homepage to be easy to navigate through. If someone is looking for a specific product, they should start from landing in the homepage to product categories to the products listed that they are looking for. It should take search engines and visitors a maximum of 3 clicks to get to any product on your website.
- Use responsive design: one thing to keep in mind is that there are people that do shop on mobile devices as well. Using a responsive design for your ecommerce website can not lead to better user experience, but also helps to improve search results. Adjust your ecommerce website to be viewable on smaller screens like design size, layout, and much more.
- Reduce page load speed: the faster your pages load, the better Google will rank you. You can decrease page load speed by focusing on deleting as many unnecessary elements as possible. It could be a huge background image covered by bright colors as the culprit, which makes it eye-disorienting for some people when they view your webpage. Remove any plugins or add-ons that have nothing to do with your ecommerce site. Larger images will make a browser take a long time loading them. Reducing an image’s size from 1,000x1,000 to 500x500 can be ideal because this will shorten load times a bit.
SEO Tools Worth Checking Out
SEMrush: this is a useful tool for the best keywords to target for your ecommerce website and for finding related keywords to help increase your rankings. By typing in a keyword related to your product, the tool will provide various sources on the web for information about related keywords, cost per click (CPC), search volume, and much more.
Conclusion
Ecommerce SEO is improving an online store’s ranking on search engines. The typical tasks related include product optimization and pages, adjusting website navigation, and link building. Different tools related to SEO mentioned in this article can hopefully help your online store grow and help you learn how to be ranked higher in search engines.
What’s Next?
